Recording and releasing music has always been a solitary experience for me.  For for than 5 years now I have been writing and recording songs at home on my laptop.  I'd play pretty much all of the instruments myself, mix everything, and release it via Creative Commons. 

But by the end of 2011, after my free release of the album Victory in a Landlocked Sea, I realized that I had probably come to the end of this phase of my musical journey.  Quite simply, the songs on this album were written for a band.  The songs were recorded pretty much as if they were played by a 5-piece band...but it was a band that, unfortunately, didn't exist!  I wanted to hear these songs in reality, in a moment, in a performance.  I wanted these songs to come alive.

So on January 2nd, 2012, I started the long, sometimes frustrating but mostly rewarding process of putting together a band.  It certainly isn't easy to start a band from nothing, but if you can meet just one right person then the rest of it starts to fall into place.   The truth is I got lucky when I met these guys.

The Abscondo band has been playing together for about three months and, during this short time, it became obvious to all of us during our rehearsals that the songs which I thought were finished are now dramatically improved.  This shouldn't have been a surprise, as each of the 4 other members of this band are truly remarkable musicians, but we faced a dilema.  

What do we do with these new, improved versions of songs that have already been made public?  The band have made an interesting and unusual decision to record an album that is made up mostly of previously recorded Abscondo material.  Last week, we went into a studio in Kosice to record with Robert Tkac.  We started by recording two singles -- Strangled Into Gray and Thunder.  What came out of these sessions surprised even us and we can't wait to let you hear these tracks.  We have plans to release these singles properly so that our Internet (and hopefully radio) audience can hear what this band actually sounds like!  Then we will move on to recording additional tracks to complete our album by the end of the year.

The new album will consist of the remade version of the one song from the Midnight Snow album (Strangled Into Gray), Thunder (which is a song I actually never recorded properly until last week), several tracks from the Victory in a Landlocked Sea album, and maybe even one or two new ones.  The only goal we have is to put together the best album we possibly can.  It doesn't matter whether or not the songs are new or a few years old...what matters is the complete song and we believe that, with this band, the songs really are new.  Anyway, we hope the outcome will be as interesting to you as it is to us.

Here's a few shots from our recording session: